Culture shock

You'd think after 15 years of being in missions and 10 years of living in the same culture, we would cease to have culture shock. But there's always a surprise in store for us hiding. 

When you live in one place for your whole life, one begins to assume that the way of doing things is not only normal, but "right". As you travel and experience differences, these seem 'wrong'. Probably the most stereotypical of these is the relationship to time and respect. Punctuality in some cultures is seen as so important, people will break relationships up if the person they're meeting is late. They will see it as the person not respecting them. However this has little to do with relationship and more to do with the concept of time and the value of time. Time is money, they'll say. So they value the person or the relationship based on how much time they're committing to the person. However, this is not how people think in other cultures. I once had my car in the garage to have it fixed and the guy said it will probably take at least 2 hours and cost in the region of 500 Philippine pesos for the job. After 8 hours, he was still working on it. In my mind, I thought, well if 2 hours costs 500 pesos, then 8 hours will cost over 2,000. When I picked up the car, he'd been working solidly on it all day and apologised, saying the job was a lot harder and more involved than he was expecting and he had to replace more parts. When the bill came, his labour was still charged at 500 pesos. I had been so ingrained that "time is money", that I could not comprehend why someone would "cheat" themselves like this. 

This is when I started to learn that time has a whole different meaning in the Philippines. Take arriving late, for example. In the 'hot' culture, late coming is more tolerated way more than how we show respect to each other, especially to elders and those in positions of power. I only realised the other day that the only person in the Philippines that calls me Peter is my wife! I'm either referred to as Pastor Peter, Sir Peter, Brother Peter, Missionary Peter, but never just "Peter". So, turning up late for an event would be acceptable in many circumstances, but addressing the senior pastor of a church as "Jack" would be considered unacceptable. 

One such culture shock that we experienced when we first arrived was the mapping of places. Big businesses and organisations would put a pin on the Google map for their location in a totally different place to the actual location. It didn't seem to matter to them that their location wasn't exactly where it said it was, as long as they placed a map, roughly near where they were. In the first few weeks of being here, I came flustered to meetings at churches and events in my mind being "late" (5-10 minutes after it officially started -- a cardinal sin in my mind), apologetic for being late, but annoyed that the map was wrong. Nobody seemed a) bothered that I was late and b) that the map was wrong! 

Bring that forwards to this weekend, where we tried out a brand new shopping mall near the airport. In a not too uncommon event, some of us needed the bathroom and sought to find it, only to find the signs pointed in every direction but the bathroom, yet there were plenty of signs proclaiming to show you where the bathrooms were. 

My son spotted this as an opportunity to make a short video clip to share online of this cultural experience: